Stepping on from a Nazi past

12:01AM BST 27 Aug 2005

With hindsight, it was a big mistake. When disgruntled nationalists with antisemitic views formed a "German Workers Party" in Munich in 1919, the army sent somebody to spy on them. Unfortunately, the man they chose was Adolf Hitler.

The party impressed Hitler but its members did not, so when he left the army a few months later he joined it, became its leader, and added the prefix National Socialist to its name. The Nazi party was born.

The birthplace of the short-lived Third Reich is a nondescript building, now a bedding store, which in the 1920s was a brewery, with a pub and restaurant on the first floor.

It was there that Hitler's rise to power began, and it is the first stop in a guided walking tour that traces the city's roots as the ideological home of the Nazi movement.

Sixty years after his suicide, Hitler has no more relevance to modern Munich than Napoleon to Paris. But the passing of a generation has allowed city authorities to acknowledge what happened here before most of them were born, with discreet reminders of events that are now history.

Konigsplatz in the old city is an imposing square of neo-classical buildings with Ionic colonnades, flanked by monumental statues of Greek and Roman generals, that house important art collections.

In 1935, granite slabs were laid in the square for Nazi rallies that are depicted in photographs on a public noticeboard nearby. A text in German and English says: "Commemoration of the Nazi terror must also bear reference to the sites of the perpetrators. This is the only way to ensure the suffering of the victims remains permanently in the public awareness."

Another reminder stands in a park opposite the Bavarian state chancellery. It is a black marble cube, bearing the names of staff and students at a city university executed in 1943 for anti-Nazi activity. Beneath is written an extract of their cry for freedom.

There are no wartime references in the Hofbräuhaus, the world-famous beer hall, where noisy crowds of tourists gather for endless beer and brass bands. It was in a banqueting hall two floors above that Hitler launched the Nazi manifesto in 1920 and then staged annual rallies of the party faithful.

Bavarian flags have replaced the swastikas, but otherwise the great baronial hall is much as it was in the 1930s. The difference is outside, where a Hard Rock Café trades under a slogan in golden letters that would make Nazis turn in their graves: "Love All, Serve All".

The guided tours in English are led by a former US army officer who served in Germany after the war.

While he was showing photographs of a Brownshirt roll-call in Odeonsplatz in the 1930s, our group was approached by a well-dressed middle-aged man. In heavily accented English, he said: "You know that's all history. It's over. We're not like that any more."

Hitler and the Third Reich Walk with Original Munich Walks (0049 8955 029374, www.radiusmunich.com) costs £7